This Progress Report comes in the wake of our new Africa Strategy, which has been prepared at a time of strong economic growth and rapid post crisis rebound that has given rise to a new optimism. In this new context, African leaders and citizens are increasingly embracing regional solutions to accelerate growth and tackle the remaining development challenges. The African Union (AU) and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are building capacity, and beginning to take on difficult political-economy issues, like peace and security, governance, and trade integration.

The Regional Integration Assistance Strategy (RIAS), the first of its kind for Africa, covered the IDA-15 period and set out a comprehensive framework for engagement, including three strategic pillars to guide Bank support for regional integration, key guiding principles and selectivity criteria to prioritize investment activities, modalities for implementation, and a results framework to monitor program impact. The strategy focused on regional infrastructure development, institutional cooperation for economic integration, and coordinated interventions to provide regional public goods, with a cross-cutting theme of capacity development of regional institutions.